Senior Software Engineer, AI-First

K&L Wine Merchants is a 50-year-old specialty wine and spirits retailer with modern infrastructure across five retail stores, a fulfillment center, an auction business, RareStorage, and a Private Client Services division.

We ship wine to customers. We build software for our teams. Increasingly, we are building agentic systems that help run the business.

Claude Code and Codex are core to how our engineering team ships. We use CLAUDE.md standards, subagent architectures, automated PR review across 100+ repos, vector pipelines with 650K+ embeddings in Pinecone, Azure Functions, and production agentic applications that are already operating at scale.

We are early, opinionated, and moving fast.

We are looking for a senior engineer who is already living in this world. Someone with strong instincts about when to let the model drive, when to take the keyboard back, and how AI-native development changes the way software gets built.

What you’ll do

You will ship production code across our stack, including React, SQL Server, Azure Functions, .NET, and TypeScript.

You will build agentic workflows on top of Claude, OpenAI, and Pinecone.

You will own features end to end, from data model to UI to deployment.

You will help set the bar for AI-native engineering practice across the team.

You will mentor engineers who are earlier in their AI adoption curve.

What you bring

Five-plus years building production software.

Deep fluency with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or comparable AI coding tools.

Experience shipping real software that uses LLMs in the loop.

Strong SQL skills.

Comfort with Azure or a comparable cloud platform.

Strong written communication.

A bias toward shipping.

What sets you apart

You have opinions about prompt engineering, context management, eval design, or subagent architecture, and you can defend them.

You have built or contributed to internal developer tooling.

You have worked in retail, e-commerce, logistics, or another operations-heavy business.

You understand product, design, business context, and where software development is going.

Why K&L

We are small enough that your work ships quickly and lands with customers, store teams, buyers, and operators the same week.

We are resourced enough to buy the right tools and build the right infrastructure.

We are owned by people who care about the craft, the category, and the long arc of the business.

The AI roadmap here is more ambitious than at most companies ten times our size. We are looking for someone who wants to help write it.

Located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Remote-friendly, with periodic onsite collaboration.

K&L Wine Merchants jobs

Senior Software Engineer